Once again, Tim Berners-Lee has expressed his fears about the evolution of the Web, which he calls to become “ really useful and informative “.
Tim Berners-Lee was invited this week to chat with Fujitsu CTO Vivek Mahajan at the company’s ActivateNow summit. Asked about the current state of the web and its evolution, the inventor of the World Wide Web made a remarkable exit, affirming that the latter had already moved away from its initial mission for a long time – mission which consists in making it accessible to everyone, and everything.
Tim Berners-Lee denounces the lack of user power on the web, concentrated in the hands of “big companies”
He dreamed of a Web that was independent of language, networks and computers. But seeing the evolution of the web, Tim Berners-Lee could only recognize that today there is “ a lot of things we need to fix “.
One of the main problems of the Web, in the eyes of its main founder, is personal data and its circulation. Tim Berners-Lee believes that today they are used for inappropriate purposes by large companies, ” in order to understand and manipulate them “he denounces, while it is, at the base, information transmitted free of charge, then exploited for advertising and commercial purposes.
TBL also points the finger at the storage of this personal data by online platforms, data then blocked in silos, which therefore results in not being able to use them. The British computer scientist thus regrets the lack of power, the very absence of power that individuals have over their data and on the Web, “ because big corporations control it “.
The Solution: Decentralized Data Warehouses, Giving Power Back to Users
So what is the solution to stem this contested evolution of the World Wide Web? Tim Berners-Lee discusses the construction of “ SolidPods “, robust pods that consist of decentralized data stores, which would offer users the power to control which entity can access their data online.
The idea seems utopian today, yet Berners-Lee is working hard on it through the company Inrupt, which he founded and which is gradually partnering with governments and companies to expand access to these SolidPods. With the leitmotif of mutual trust between the different parties.
Concretely, this store should be seen as a huge table offering maximum transparency to users, who could then decide to share such health data with such a doctor or researcher in search of a treatment related to a serious illness. “ It is a system based on intentional economy, guided by the intention of the person who wants to do things », Summarizes Tim Berners-Lee, aware that the task promises to be difficult, but confident in a Web that is more respectful of the interests of individuals.
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Source: Tech Radar
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